I have a problem starting aptosid after a fresh install of aptosid 2011-02 on a Lenovo IdeaPad S205. Installation was successfull but after restart and trying to boot from HDD, a black screen appears with "GRUB loading." and that's it. Then nothing happens.

thanks for your reply. I am using AMD64 of course. Sorry, did not mention that. I once tried to do it with GPT but the installer asks to install GRUB in MBR and if I understand that correct, that is not possible for GPT. So what should I do for GPT installation? Let grub install on partition? Or do I need a special /boot partition?

If you boot your CD through UEFI (you'll see the blue grub2 menu instead of the red graphical isolinux menu), and use GPT with a vfat formatted "EFI system partition" (EF00, ~200 MB), the installer will switch to UEFI. Given that UEFI booting was implemented literally days before the 2011-02 release, the installer GUI could not be adapted, yet - so even though it displays MBR as target, it will use UEFI.

If the drive is partitioned with GPT (is it? what does "fdisk -l /dev/sda" say) then you should have a "Bios Boot Partition" (gdisk type ef02) as the first partition. This can be as small as 1M if you want, but I'd play safe and give it say 16M and if you think you might ever want to boot the disk with UEFI then probably saner to give it about 200M so you can convert that partition into an "EFI System" partition later and have plenty of space for multiple bootloaders.

If you were hoping to boot using UEFI now you need to boot the live image with UEFI (so you use it's grub menu to boot the aptosid cd/dvd, not the graphical boot menu), have a EFI System partition (fat formatted) and not be installing to a removable drive.

Either way the install-gui program can "mislead you" a little, when it says it is installing the bootloader to MBR for a GPT partitioned disk NOT with UEFI then it means it wants to put grub in a BIOS Boot Partition. Whatever it says in the installer, if you meet the UEFI boot criteria I just explained then it will install an UEFI bootloader into the EFI System partition.

Ok, what I found now in web is, that the S205 has a BIOS emulation, which uses it automatically for an HDD with MBR partition table. So in principle there should be no problem mit MBR I guess.

The USB stick also starts automatically with the usual red aptosid boot menu instead of grub. That means, the installer claims he would install grub to MBR although he will install it to the correct partition (if HDD is set with GPT)?

As soon as I am at home I will try to change the MBR partition table to GPT and install again.

This is still confusing You are implying that the disk is NOT GPT, if this is the case then there should be no need to change to GPT.

I guess the sanest thing to do assuming that is correct would be to just try and use the manual instructions for reinstalling grub to see if that fixes the problem and makes it boot, and if it doesn't then it might give you an interesting error message which might give us a clue as to what the real problem is.

I'm so sorry. Just noticed, that I made a mistake in my first post. Partition table of my HDD is MBR NOT GPT.

Now I tried your suggestion to reinstall grub using the method described in the manual. Reinstall seems to be successful but after restart of the computer, it is still saying "Grub loading.". Only change is that now the computer reboots itself after couple of seconds.

What I found was strange, is a message after the reinstall, which said, that setup of grub-efi-am64 was successful, although I specifically said to reinstall grub-pc.

And maybe to make a few things clearer (hopefully):

Partition table is MBR!
sda1 is marked with the "boot" Flag and formated as ext4. It is mounted as root.
There is no specific /boot partition!
/home is on another parition sda5, which is also formated as ext4.

The Live-USB stick starts with the usual red aptosid theme boot menu. According to what you said before, this means it is in the "BIOS" mode (don't know how to call it better), correct?

Can you run through the chroot to reinstall grub proceedure again, and when you are in the chroot run "dpkg -l | grep grub" to paste the output in here.

You can then try removing grub-efi-amd64-bin from the chroot (and grub-efi-amd64 if it is actually installed, though it shouldn't be).

Once you have that output and have removed the grub-efi related packages you can try to "dpkg-reconfigure grub-pc" and then try re-installing it as suggested in the manual with "apt-get install --reinstall grub-pc". Please again provide the full output from running this command here as then we might have more chance of figuring out what is going on/wrong on your machine.

I somewhat solved the problem. Actually it is not really solved but I found a workaround.

Meanwhile I installed Win7 to exclude a hardware issue. With the program easybcd I manipulated the W7 bootloader so it can start grub and that works! I do not know, why this is working, because the "usual" way (installing grub into the MBR) still does not work. Installing grub on a partition and firing it through the W7 bootloader works. It is not really a solution but at least it is fine for me since now I can use Linux/aptosid on my machine.

Thanks all for your help!

cu

dpt

Post subject:Posted: 17.08.2011, 09:32

Joined: 2010-09-11
Posts: 281
Location: New Delhi
Status: Offline

Do I see that someone installed W7 after installing aptosid
and using both?

_________________In a lunatic asylum, everyone thinks that he is the doctor.

Nex

Post subject:Posted: 18.08.2011, 05:40

Joined: 2011-01-13
Posts: 16

Status: Offline

Hi,

no, in principle I installed aptosid after W7, but it is possible with the method I mentioned (easybcd for manipulating W7 bootloader to load grub and grub installed on partition).